Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Politics: If they want to get rid of me . . .

Alaska's Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate, vowed on Monday to remain in office until the chamber agrees to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling.

Stevens, 82, last month threw the Senate into chaos when he threatened to keep lawmakers in session over the Christmas holiday unless members approved drilling in ANWR, a wilderness area about the size of South Carolina.

He eventually conceded defeat after trying to attach the drilling language to a must-pass Pentagon funding bill.

On Monday, he said he would not give up the fight.

"I'm going to stay and get ANWR, there's no question about that. It's going to happen," Stevens told reporters. "If they want to get rid of me, they're going to pass ANWR."

I'm so used to greens doing things like refusing to come down from trees until their insane list of demands are met that I find it wonderfully refreshing that a US senator considers it his life’s work to open up wilderness to human production, and that he’d rather die before letting the work go undone.